Alice Fordham

Kainaz Amaria
/ NPR

Alice Fordham is an NPR International Correspondent based in Beirut, Lebanon.

In this role, she reports on Lebanon, Syria and many of the countries throughout the Middle East.

Before joining NPR in 2014, Fordham covered the Middle East for five years, reporting for The Washington Post, the Economist, The Times and other publications. She has worked in wars and political turmoil but also amid beauty, resilience and fun.

In 2011, Fordham was a Stern Fellow at the Washington Post. That same year she won the Next Century Foundation's Breakaway award, in part for an investigation into Iraqi prisons.

Fordham graduated from Cambridge University with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics.

"We've got massive flags with Harry and Meghan on," says Mike Drummond of the Red Bus souvenir shop next to the iconic London Eye. A Union Jack with the royal couple's faces in the middle hangs high on the wall and is selling fast.

There are commemorative plates in buttercup yellow and curly gilding, selling for $16, presentation stand included. And there are gold and white-fringed bookmarks, kitchen towels and bargain key rings ($4 each).

"The most popular item is the mugs, the souvenir mugs. But we've got coasters, teaspoons, magnets, everything," says Drummond.

In a village clinging to the side of a volcano in southern Guatemala, Florencio Hernandez sits in a cinder block house with the corn harvest piled up, a chicken coop in the corner and pots bubbling on a stove in the courtyard.

His home is the proud product of a hardworking life shaped by migration. As millions of migrants in the U.S. listen apprehensively to fierce political debate over who should be allowed to stay, this village of 550 families tells a stark story of the wide ripple effects that migration — and deportation — can have.

In the heart of Beirut, architect Mona El Hallak herds a group of students together outside a monumental mansion — a vast, elegant building whose yellow walls and graceful pillars are ravaged by thousands of bullet holes.

"We are," she shouts over the cacophonous traffic, "at the intersection of Damascus Road and Independence Avenue."

In a pink-painted village clinic converted into a field hospital a few miles from the Mosul front lines, there is no emergency care facility, so wounded Iraqi troops are just wheeled into the foyer for treatment.

Over the crackle of walkie-talkies, one of two men arriving with shrapnel wounds from a car bomb calls out, "Mohammad Jassim, my brother, where is he?"

A quickening flow of civilians is leaving the city of Mosul, fleeing fighting between Iraqi security forces and the ISIS militants who have held the city for more than two years.

A total of 28,400 people have run away since an offensive to retake the densely populated western half of the city began Feb. 19, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

There are a lot of children playing outside in eastern Mosul. They run around the front yards of their houses, chasing each other through the alleyways, as their parents sit on plastic chairs keeping — at most — half an eye on them.

At the al-Kufa boys' school, Mustafa Salem, 13, says this freedom is new. During the 2 1/2 years that ISIS controlled his neighborhood, he was rarely allowed to leave the house.

The tribal delegation visiting Sheikh Abdelraouf al-Dhahab was still talking in the very early hours of the morning last Sunday when his nephew, Abdullah, noticed strangers approaching on foot across the rocky, inhospitable terrain of central Yemen.

"Who are you?" Abdullah called out into the night. "Who are you?"

The men shot him dead.

Startled by the gunfire, the Dhahab family scrambled to take up its own weapons and defend its house.

Now we're going to hear perspective from some of the Syrian citizens newly banned from entering the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees live in neighboring Lebanon, where NPR's Alice Fordham has their reaction to the news.

When I meet Nineb Lamassu at England's Cambridge University, where he's a researcher, he transports us to his Middle Eastern homeland by opening his computer and playing me a recording of a man reciting a poem.

Somewhere between speech and song, the voice is old, a little gruff, rising and falling rhythmically. Even in Aramaic — I don't speak a word of Aramaic — the effect is hypnotic.

The delight that architect Marwa al-Sabouni takes in the Old City of Homs is luminous and contagious.

We're walking round the historic area at the heart of the central Syrian city, north of Damascus, which was for two years a bastion of rebel fighters, besieged by the government. And at first, all I can see is destruction. Some buildings are pancaked by airstrikes, others have shell holes ripped in the sides. Almost all are sprayed with bullet holes.

OK, let's turn now to the latest in Syria where a ceasefire brokered by Russia and Turkey is in place - well, at least in theory. Rebels say President Bashar al-Assad's forces are violating that cease fire, and NPR's Alice Fordham tells us where.

You can tell the coastal city of Tartus is on the side of the Syrian government because everything here is intact.

Little waves lap at rocks on a wide, quiet seafront dotted with cafes; boats ferry people back and forth to a nearby island. There are parks with manicured hibiscus shrubs covered in pale pink blossoms, and busy markets.